Apr 5, 2011
52 notes

Hatching

In the next few weeks, I’m selling my car, moving to San Francisco, and joining Twitter as a Software Engineer on their Internal Tools team.

Twitter has witnessed phenomenal growth both in its offices and on its servers. To cope with this, they’ve built a small, efficient, and skilled team to build beautiful, functional web applications that give tremendous power to the staff to visualize and work with the Twitter network. Jason Stirman, the team lead and my new boss, explains it well on the Engineering blog. I’ll be joining this team to do front-end web development, design, and visualization work, and I’m tremendously excited to join Stirman, Jacob, Alex, Chad, James, and the rest of the infectiously enthusiastic team at Twitter HQ.

To fully understand my fascination with the service though, and why I’m thrilled to contribute to it requires some background. (If you’re a tl;dr type, you’re probably done reading. Maybe throw this in Instapaper.)

~~~

Almost four and a half years ago, I signed up for and posted my first update on Twitter.

January 17, 2007, 10:32p:

About to pass out

It was a Wednesday night after the evening screening for my Shakespeare and Film course where we’d just watched Henry V and I was supposed to be writing my response essay to the film. Instead, I was browsing the web, and saw a widget on the left side of Paul Stamatiou’s site with his latest Twitter update. I recalled coming across Twitter a few months prior in November of 2006, when it hit delicious/popular (RIP) and at the time could not understand the appeal of a site that asked, “What are you doing?” so I didn’t sign up. But in this context on a personal site, it made sense, like a modular archive of AIM away messages — which was actually something for which I had recently been longing. I signed up, and posted that update, but did not actually pass out until after I squandered the night away, finally completing the essay in the early morning.

Like most people, the attraction of such a service was hard to grasp. I didn’t post again for another two weeks, but was curious about the service and wanted to play with it. I set my account to “nudge me” via SMS if I hadn’t updated in 24 hours (a feature that’s long been put out to pasture) which helped build repetition and plant the notion of keeping my status fresh. I also set up SMS notifications for new updates from certain people I was following to stay abreast on my Treo 700p (also RIP).

Over the coming months, I encouraged friends to join the service, but their initial hesitancy matched mine. Slowly though, a few started to come aboard. (One friend only agreed to join if I would get up early on a Saturday to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons. I keep hip company.) Despite their resistance, I continued using the service, treating it at the very least as a sort of archive of daily minutia. Over time, notable events in my life became stored here as casual utterances, behavioral patterns and usage missteps emerged, and among what seemed like a lot of noise were also several signals, which often led to happenstance encounters and fortuitous events.

My last year at college was coming to an end. Commencement ceremonies were on a beautiful Saturday morning at Michigan Stadium, and I was excited to be done with classes and see Bill Clinton speak.

April 28, 2007, 9:58a:

Sweet seats on the field of the Big House. Seeing everyone. Clinton’s flight’s 10 minutes late.

In May of 2007, I noticed an uptick in the usage among those I was following. I went over my text messaging plan by some 400 messages and that’s when I turned off SMS updates. In September I won tickets to visit Universal Studios through a giveaway by Josh Hallett over the service at blogorlando. In December, I learned the lesson of posting from multiple accounts.

Idiot.

In January of 2008, my usage statistics painted a picture of my friends and sleeping patterns. In March, one of my great co-workers and the Sentinel’s fantastic illustrators, Niko Floyd, presented me with a farewell drawing that seemed representative of my behavior and time at the Sentinel as I prepared to take a job with USA TODAY.

How The Pit® Said Goodbye

My usage of the service only grew over the next few years, and its value was proven to me countless times. Sometimes I treat it as my sounding board, and other times I’ve used it to quickly inform friends during emergencies. At the end of last year, I posted a tweet while being taken to the ER in an ambulance, which may sound instinctually odd but was my first reaction in a moment of panic.

December 12, 2010, 8:10p:

In an ambulance, to the hospital. Don’t know what’s wrong.

Moments later, I saw an outpouring of concern and well-wishes from close friends and casual acquaintances which was really incredible and yet again underscored my fascination with Twitter’s core concept.

~~~

Twitter has evolved into a vital communication medium for me, both in learning about and disseminating information. It’s given me dexterity in space and time, and has introduced me to new people, new ideas, and new places. And starting on May 2nd, it’s giving me this new job.

I’m extremely grateful for my time at USA TODAY; it has afforded me with great opportunity and given me the chance to work on projects of which I had never dreamed. I learned a tremendous amount and worked with some truly fantastic and talented people I now call close friends.

I hope this next adventure will do the same.

  1. andymboyle reblogged this from couch
  2. jodilyn said: WHAT??!?!??!? So excited for you, but you will be missed! Are you having a send-off party?
  3. couch posted this
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Ephemera, thoughts, and curiosities from William Couch (@couch).
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